Every beautiful thing I own
is from you. My stain glass lamp and
my marigold teapot and the blue sweater I wear every day
My coffee habit, my cocky attitude
My job, all the things I say
I dream of
Are all imported, all you  


And just when I think I have wrung myself out fully
Like a filthy dish towel into the sink
I remember
Even my stupid dish towels—
The ones with the strawberries printed on them
and the stains I can’t get out
those are from you too.

I dreamt I turned my mother
into a bird—white,
with long thin feathers
and wrinkled red skin around her eyes.
I watched her cluck and scrabble
at the ground.
We ate her for dinner,
three lean coyotes in the coop.
and in the morning
I cleaned up the feathers,
pawed at her leftover bones and beak.
I buried it all in the garden,
the strange curve of my wolfish face
reflected in a single glob of fat
still clinging
to the wet, cold dirt.

Hungry star eater
Your lattice of crown-shy skyscrapers
Bathes the world
In permanent fluorescence.

It is a pilgrimage to a lesser-known shrine
a whispered vesper to the running salt sea
It is martyrdom the moment your knees sink
to the stone of the altar, all godhead and
holiness spilling from your lips and onto mine.
We are wine-drunk against parched rock,
suspended momentarily in the sliver
of a sunbeam, our mingled breaths
cradled in a sunken half-moon,
all sage and smoke and salt,
an offering to a lesser-known god.

the last of the September apples,
molded and sunken in the dirt
plucked from the earth by
fat small hands,
she fingers the loose brown skin
and, grotesquely, it gives way,
its wrinkled and rotting face
shrinking from the sun.

in the caustic brine
the fish excavate my flesh
until i am nothing
but clean white bone
yet, undone as i am,
all at once the quiet lull
makes me whole again.

When we go out
I wear cheap vanilla perfume and a push-up bra
We sit in the back of your car
And I let you put your tongue in my mouth, your fingers,
your hands around my throat
I know you think there’s a natural order to these things
But you won’t say it to me out loud
You just get on top of me and pin me down
And I wonder why my sick little mind likes it.